The Shit

When the World Breaks Open received this award from someone who assures me it’s not personal–the awarder knows me, but that’s all. This is a relief. An award without personal feelings involved is a much bigger deal. So buy my book. It’s objectively The Shit.

I know there are certain delightful writers who are tracking how often I post and then calling me out publicly when I say I post a prompt weekly (I’m glad to be held accountable). I have been thinking a lot about stumbling and getting up and about the sort of latent anxiety and excitement of my book coming out next week. I feel anxious, but almost a forced sort of anxious. Like I SHOULD feel anxious–which maybe means I will feel anxious and should guard against it. Last Sunday the boys and I went to see Christylez Bacon and Wytold play with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. It was incredible. The show was extraordinary and separately, there’s something so gratifying about getting to see people you know achieve things they deserve and have worked hard for. It literally brought tears to my eyes. My older son was totally a nightmare about going to the concert when we spoke the day before, but had no problem admitting how cool it was once it began–I don’t know that I could be prouder of him for anything than I was for that. How often do we hang on to a single point of view because we don’t want to negate ourselves? Insist that we don’t like something because we were jerks about trying it in the first place and now we have to stand by our position, unwilling to admit that we were wrong. And by being jerks, we can sometimes convince even ourselves that good things are bad because we didn’t plan to like them.

Sometimes it goes the other way–we think we love something and that it’s the best thing for us and it doesn’t turn out to be. But there’s a period–the period between leaping and landing that’s a whole lot like flying. There’s something just gorgeous about even bad love.

If I had made fewer mistakes, I would have a much shorter book. If I had made fewer mistakes, I would know myself less. Write about the flying before you knew your mistake was a mistake. Write about what you learned.

I read this poem and love it. The lines to borrow are: “Everyone forgets that…” and “But anything worth doing is…”

Failing and Flying

by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

The Shit

The Shit

Failing and Flying

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